In an inaugural year, New Year’s Day rolls around. Americans make resolutions. Only a few weeks later, the new president stands up in front of the country and makes his own resolutions. They go along the lines of ‘I will stay true to that document there in the National Archives,’ ‘I have a basic facility with the English language,’ and ‘I will try to make this place a little better.’

This January is a good time for comparisons. In some sense, it might be our duty as Americans to change our own lives in ways we ‘can believe in,’ whether or not we support the president’s particular geopolitical and economic decisions.‘

It’s also a good time for UMass students to give our still-‘new’ chancellor a thorough grilling by holding him to the president’s standard, both as an administrator and as a leader occupying an inevitably public position.

I’m worried about the latter. I’m afraid that Chancellor Robert C. Holub will, like almost all chancellors in memory, hide away in Whitmore under the delusion that he is a mere administrator.

As I see it, there is no such thing. Any position of administrative leadership ‘- from the chancellor’s office at UMass to the principal’s desk at your high school to the whitest house in Washington ‘- comes with both the stain and the responsibilities of humankind’s first institution of leadership: monarchy.

I kid you not.

The responsibilities of a public leader go beyond the mere tasks on the proverbial desk, and extend into the realm of the weird and unknown. In college campuses and nation-states alike, leadership is ‘- in one important sense ‘- a great big game of ‘Simon Says.’

The citizens or students or faculty members can’t be any more hopeful or resourceful or articulate in their public speech than the person in the leader’s chair. The executive, from where I see it, sets the upper limits.

Here’s where I worry about Robert Holub.

Articulate, insightful and bent on unity as his frequent emails may be, the chancellor works in Whitmore. That particular piece of architecture built with the same sense of welcome as a high-security prison, and it’s not a meaningless observation to say so.

If Holub is out to unify the university, he needs to have a sense of the raw material he’s working with. If he’s out to inspire students and faculty to play along in our collective game of ‘Simon Says,’ willfully jumping onto the H.M.S. ‘A Better UMass,’ he needs to ‘- first and foremost ‘- earn our trust by showing that he understands us.

This, of course, is a tall order. Hardly any university is as demographically, socio-economically, politically and intellectually various as ours. UMass is a school with a sense of self-definition that is nebulous at best, and some of us pride ourselves on this fact.

We earn our educations by dragging ourselves around by our own bootstraps, cutting through red tape with scissors that we made by our own design on our time, and we come through the process knowing that it was all for the better.

For all of its ivory-tower shortcomings, UMass Amherst is ‘- in the end ‘- much less distant from the world outside than most universities. It reeks of the bureaucratic climate of the state of Massachusetts, it’s constantly under construction, the humanities are banished to rooms with broken windows while the business school flourishes, and none of the buildings look good by themselves, yet alone together.

It’s not at all your run-of-the-mill, well-kempt, fairy-tale campus. As the legend goes, it’s Scooby-Doo. It’s a Zoo. It’s a wasteland of rules and regulations.

For those of us who learn this early, and teach ourselves to deal directly with the realities of UMass, there’s a benefit to this kind of education. You learn to keep your feet on the ground.

There’s also an apprehension that a leader like Holub, no matter how good his intentions, will carry out his work of positive change, completely unaware of all that will be lost in the process.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that a much-improved UMass would not be an asset to the state, the faculty, the future students, and the town of Amherst. I’m simply presenting the argument that, as it stands, what UMass does best is allow its students the opportunity to pursue a completely self-directed education.

It’s something you can’t institutionalize. There’s no guidebook to the kind of education that many UMass students get. Call it the ‘guerilla Bachelor’s.’

If Holub can’t understand this experience, he won’t be able to earn the trust of those who have earned their educations the hard way. At UMass, there’s quite a few of us.

When you’re playing ‘Simon Says,’ the leader doesn’t just shout out commands. As I recall, Simon always waved his arms up and down if that’s what he wanted the rest of us to do.
So, if the chancellor wants his student body to play along, he’d better step outside of Whitmore ‘- literally and figuratively ‘- and wave his ridiculous arms up and down where all of us can see them.

Then we’ll follow the leader.

James Mathews is a Collegian editor. He can be reached at [email protected].